Wednesday, March 11, 2009

I think also there's a milder version of this [Christian patriarchy] that often raises a few eyebrows but doesn't seem as too dangerous within the broader Christian community. They sometimes call themselves complementarians, and they speak about submission and headship, but, really, it is more in their speech than in actual practice. I think there's really a continuum. It's not that they're not taking those ideas seriously, but they use gentler language among people who are promoting it, in a more mainstream sense -- more mainstream being like the Southern Baptist Convention, which is very mainstream in numbers, but they speak explicitly about the need for wives to submit to husbands.

And this is getting some very prominent play. Mike Huckabee signed on to their 1998 doctrinal statement that women need to submit to their husbands, so this is something that's very much a part of mainstream faith. But it's tied much more closely than people acknowledge with these much more extreme elements.

1 comment:

Yeah the Quiverfull Movement scare me. I think most people's mainstream exposure to the Quiverfull Movement comes from watching the Duggar family on tv, which makes the movement look all nice and "family values" oriented---considering the Duggars are nice and friendly people. However, when one digs deeper into researching the movement---one sees the darker side of the movement.